This CO2 is acting as a reusable fluid in a closed loop. The initial capture of the CO2 costs energy, but the battery keeps using the same CO2 over and over again. So the question of efficiency should be more about land usage and maintenance of the rest of the parts and the labor needed for each megawatt stored vs what other grid scale energy storage costs in materials and labor.

The rough reality is that batteries aren’t going to be up to the task of grid scale energy storage unless they have a couple huge breakthroughs. Something like this is a far less materially expensive way to store energy for later use.

Currently most grid scale energy storage is just pumping water up a hill and letting it back down through a generator. It is extremely limited in where it can be used and requires tremendous space to be effective.

In fairness a government should be the only entity surveilling people in its own borders under most any circumstances.

I’m pretty opposed to most any kind of surveillance outside of warranted due process, and I don’t think that any domestic surveillance needs privacy for longer than it takes to do an investigation and prosecution.

It’s when governments are allowed to do things in secret and outside of the law that the whole concept of the law is undermined.

From what I can tell, it looks like there are a lot of loans out right now, the rate at which they are issued has increased since the beginning of the Trump presidency has increased dramatically, and this is like really bad because If those loans don’t get paid back then pillars start collapsing underneath the financial system. Lose too many of those and the whole thing comes crashing down.

This one graph doesn’t represent all of the bad that is going on, it’s just a sort of a weathervane to tell you which way the wind is blowing. …and right now it’s blowing where the sun don’t shine.

A lot of people want a good tool that works.

This is not a good tool and it does not work.

Most of them don’t understand that yet.

I am optimistic to think that they will have the opportunity find that out in time to not be walked off a cliff.

I’m optimistically predicting that when people find out how much it actually costs and how shit it is that they will redirect their energies to alternatives if there are still any alternatives left.

A better tool may come along, but it’s not this stuff. Sometimes the future of a solution doesn’t just look like more of the previous solution.

These kinds of questions are strange to me.

A great many people are using them voluntarily, a lot of people are using them because they don’t know how to avoid using them and feel that they have no alternative.

But the implication of the question seems to be that people wouldn’t choose to use something that is worse.

In order to make that assumption you have to first assume that they know qualitatively what is better and what is worse, that they have the appropriate skills or opportunity necessary to choose to opt in or opt out, and that they are making their decision on what tools to use based on which one is better or worse.

I don’t think you can make any of those assumptions. In fact I think you can assume the opposite.

The average person doesn’t know how to evaluate the quality of research information they receive on topics outside of their expertise.

The average person does not have the technical skills necessary to engage with non-AI augmented systems presuming they want to.

The average person does not choose their tools based on what is the most effective at producing the correct truth but instead on which one is the most usable, user friendly, convenient, generally accepted, and relatively inexpensive.

A lot of those things have a business model that relies on putting the competition out of business so you can jack up the price.

Uber broke taxis in a lot of places. It completely broke that industry by simply ignoring the laws. Uber had a thing that it could actually sell that people would buy.

It took years before it started making money, in an industry that already made money.

LLMs Don’t even have a path to profitability unless they can either functionally replace a human job or at least reliably perform a useful task without human intervention.

They’ve burned all these billions and they still don’t even have something that can function as well as the search engines that proceeded them no matter how much they want to force you to use it.

Every particle accelerator that has been built has paid for itself in research value. There’s basically nothing that comes out of AI research except the need for a bigger model.

The comparison is poor. Particle accelerators are science, LLMs do not produce science.

That’s not to say that we couldn’t build LLMS that would be useful for scientific purposes but we’re not. That is not the function or the goal of the people building these things.

The volume of the power vacuum in the Republican party would likely be audible from Europe.

If you swap one and four, That’s how I use the monitors on my desktop

I just let all the cat hair collect there and it seems to do a pretty good job of holding on to the crumbs until I vacuum.

I’m not talking about the openly bigoted chuds out there I’m talking about the regular rank and file Americans who decided there was no room to question the the horrors we expanded from the shadows and filled every corner of our media with.

Formerly kindly everyday american morons didn’t just watch it, they cheered. They scolded they youth for thinking we were entitled to the bill of rights. It was fucking bizarre who swallowed the bait.

After the 2000 election it was obvious that Republicans played by different rules than Democrats.

After 911 this country lost its fucking mind. Like millions and millions and millions of people just became fucking psychopaths. All of a sudden everybody was willing to split hairs on torture, child murder, forced starvation, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, double tap drone strikes The list goes on.

We became completely fucking insane. It was obvious at that point this is where we were headed. That was when I realized I needed to register as a Republican. Democrats don’t care about my primary votes if they even hold one but in my youthfully naive hope I entertained the idea that you could democratically affect anything.

Aside from the extra good feels of getting to vote against Donald Trump multiple times, The only real benefit is that I get visits from local Republican party officials and they think I’m one of them.

I always put on my home accent and complain about liberals but I don’t think they understand that they are just liberals of the God bothering type to me and I seek to dismantle them from root to stem. … … But please tell me about this canvassing operation you have in my town… What kind of cars are they driving? Just curious

The officer should have asked. That’s when you could tell him you don’t consent to a search. It’s a bad idea to do this for a lot of reasons but that’s not one of them.

If someone is searching through your pockets without your approval and against your wishes, they better hope they are right to do so and are taking all of the necessary precautions.

You’re not under any obligation to make the private contents of your pockets safe for other people to rifle through.

Unfortunately the people making that call are largely people that are on that list or closely connected to people that are.

I think this is, in large part, one of the reasons many of these authoritarian types get out of control.

On some level they know whether or not they consider their actions to be illegal that other people will. At some point they anticipate blowback and a lot of their flailing overreach stems directly from trying to get out ahead of any consequences that may come their way.

Or this is the fall she was brought in for…

My ideal Duke nukem plot would basically just be some hypermasculine caricature that starts a normal day and is faced with increasingly insane excuses for ultraviolence at which he performs exceedingly well.

He’s not scared, He’s not bored, He’s not brooding, He’s having a fucking day, and he’s all out of bubble gum.

Despite the ever-increasing Gore and violence he never has to say or do anything problematic, just fucking brutally uncompromisingly violence against people that super duper obviously need it.

Comical masculinity instead of toxic masculinity. Nothing even needs to change about his character.

I worked at a dental lab once and we had a patient who The doctor said wanted bigger teeth.

Having made teeth for a while, this was a first for everyone in the lab. At some point teeth don’t get much bigger. At some point the amount of metal and porcelain were putting into the mouth of this 82-year-old woman is a substantial weight of material not to mention its volume.

When one doctor refused to make any bigger teeth she went to other doctors who required her to pay up front. We got this lady’s case back a dozen times.

We’ve remade this thing from scratch at her expense and she looked downright cartoonish every time we’d get photos back.

The frame for her full arch mandibular implant retained PFM was the single largest cast of gold alloy anyone in the entire lab had ever poured or seen poured for dental work.

Some people have money and they’re addicted to the process. I can’t think of any other reason for this lady to have done that.

1994 a service called e world.

It was a funny little thing, My 2800 baud modem brought me tons of adventures and gave me a place to share D&D ideas with others.

A friend of mine noticed that a police car was coming up fast behind us so he told our friend with a joint to get rid of it. The police car had its lights flashing and though we were going probably 60 or 70 it was easily going 80 or 90.

The friend flicked it right out the window, and to my great horror it went right in the window of the cop car as it sailed by us. We could see it bounce into the back window like a hammer striking iron, The cab lit up brighter than I thought a single joint would shine against the glare of the cherries and berries.

We immediately got off the highway, took the first few turns we could and then parked in a driveway with all the lights off.

Two police cars drove down the street behind us with lights flashing but no sirens while we hunkered down trying to avoid being seen. We just kind of hid there for probably 40 minutes until we stop seeing police lights.